"There's an old saying..."

[Garson O'Toole]

Dan Goncharoff wrote
> Didn't Moltke, der Grosse Schweiger, say this (in German)?
> "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy".

The Yale Book of Quotations provides the following translation:

[Begin excerpt]
Helmuth von Moltke
Prussian military leader, 1800–1891

No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first
encounter with the enemy’s main force.
Kriegsgeschichtliche Einzelschriften (1880)
[End excerpt]

Here is a cite showing a translation into English in 1891 of an
extended version of the quotation.

Cite: 1891 January, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution
(Great Britain) Volume 35, Number 155, Cruizer-War and Coast Defence
by Commander H. Garbett, [Translated by  permission from the
"Mittheilungen aus dem Gebiete des Seewesens"] Start Page 47, Quote
Page 47, Published by Harrison and Sons, London. (Google Books full
view)

http://books.google.com/books?id=bsJMAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Moltke+very%22#v=snippet&

[Begin excerpt]
Field-Marshal Moltke very rightly lays down in the volume issued by
the General Staff on the Franco-German War, that no plan of operations
can reach with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the
enemy's main force, and that only uninitiated civilians believe they
can see in the progress of a campaign the prearranged execution of an
original plan, all the details of which have been previously settled
and carried out to the end.
[End excerpt]

Garson

On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 11:13 AM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "There's an old saying..."
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Didn't Moltke, der Grosse Schweiger, say this (in German)?
>
> "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy".
>
> DanG
>
>
> On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      "There's an old saying..."
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Maybe everyone already knows this but me (Charlie and Garson in
>> particular), but people seem to say "There's an old saying...." when what
>> they mean is something like, "I heard somebody say this, or something very
>> much like it, on one occasion, and it stuck in my mind because it's so
>> clever or succinct."
>>
>> Seeming exmple from CNN the other day: "There's an old saying in the Army:
>> 'The first thing to go bad is the plan.'"
>>
>> Sound like a genuine proverb, right?  However, a Google search yields
>> nothing. Of course, I may have overlooked some slight variant that would
>> get 10,000 hits, but the principle still seems sound: for most people, it
>> only takes one utterance plus a good memory to turn a catchy generalization
>> an "old saying."
>>
>> JL
>>
>> --
>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>>
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>>
>
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